by Anita Waller
Ray Irwin moved across to his computer, and clicked on the email that had come in at some point during the briefing. He read it and looked up. ‘Boss, some information just come in. The bullet removed from Isla Yardley came from the same gun as the bullets removed from Anthony Jackson and Bethan Walters. But there’s something else. The gun was used in another crime, back in 2002. Somebody called Craig Adams was killed and dumped in the Wye.’
‘Was there an arrest?’ Just for a moment, Tessa Marsden thought it could be case over.
‘One minute,’ Ray said, and keyed in the name. ‘No, boss, nobody ever arrested, cold case.’
‘Brilliant. So we’re adding bodies from everywhere in this bloody case. Okay, Hannah, take a look at this Craig Adams case, will you. We’ll discuss it this afternoon. Penny – you tracked our Caroline down yet?’
‘No, she wasn’t working last night. She could be anywhere, boss.’
‘Right, I’ll leave her a voicemail. That’ll get her in pretty damn quick.’ Tessa allowed herself a small smile as she remembered the panic in Caroline’s voice when she had told her she was about to be arrested.
‘I’m off to Stoke. Who’s coming with me? First to the door gets it.’
There was a mad scramble but one of the new PCs assigned to the murder investigation, and sitting at the desk nearest to the door, won by a mile.
‘Smart move, Claire,’ Tessa said with a grin. ‘Let’s go talk to footballers. You like football?’
‘Sheffield Wednesday season ticket holder, ma’am,’ Claire said proudly, and the room groaned.
‘Shouldn’t be allowed,’ someone shouted from the back of the room, and it was followed by a different voice, shouting, ‘Yeah! Up the Owls!’
The two women left the room to moans and groans. ‘And don’t call me ma’am, Claire. Boss will do.’
‘Okay, ma’am,’ Claire said.
Tessa sighed. It was going to be a long day…
Peter Swift wasn’t there. He hadn’t turned up for training, he hadn’t responded to telephone calls to his mobile phone and upper management at his club were deeply concerned.
Tessa spent a quarter of an hour explaining the situation, and she could see panic begin to infiltrate the meeting. It seemed that footballers valued their jobs, and didn’t go missing without due reason.
‘I’ll need details of his address and landline please. I only have a mobile number for him.’
She was handed a slip of paper with everything she needed on it, and Marsden and Claire left, promising to ring the club if they should track Peter down, especially if he were ill. The club doctor could then be despatched to medicate the footballer safely.
It only took twenty minutes to arrive at the large detached home of the type favoured by footballers the world over; surrounded by high walls and an electronic gate, the house seemed impregnable.
Claire pressed the speaker button on the gate and a male voice answered. She explained who they were, flashed her warrant card at the camera, and the gates widened to allow them passage.
The front door opened as they climbed out.
‘DI Marsden,’ Tessa said, holding out her hand. ‘And you are?’
‘Robert Newstead.’ He shook her hand, and motioned for them to go in.
The entrance hall was huge, immaculately decorated in creams and golds, and had several doors leading off it, as well as a magnificent staircase leading to the first level.
He led them to a lounge, where he had obviously been reading the newspaper as they had arrived.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you, but we’re looking for Peter Swift.’
‘He’s at the club. You know he’s a footballer? Plays for Stoke City?’
‘Yes we do. He’s not there. We were hoping to catch him here. He’s not contacted the club to say he’s not fit for training, or anything.’
‘What?’ Robert stood. ‘But he left around half past eight this morning. I’m expecting him back sometime in the next hour.’
‘Can I ask your relationship to Mr Swift please?’ Tessa asked.
‘As long as you keep it to yourself, you can. I’m his partner. We’ve been together nearly three years, but Peter’s agent doesn’t want him to go public on it until he’s finished playing. Creates bad vibes on the terraces apparently, and the chants will be pretty nasty it seems. We will marry when he leaves football behind, but until then…’
‘So can you think where Peter will have gone? Has he ever done this before?’
‘Oh my god, no. He’s been with Stoke since he joined the academy at sixteen, he lives for that club.’ Robert took out his phone and listened intently. ‘Straight to voice mail.’
Tessa stood, followed by Claire. ‘Thank you, Mr Newstead. When you hear from him, he must contact me.’ She handed him a business card. ‘He is in considerable danger, and I need to make sure he’s safe.’
‘What if he’s not safe now?’ His frowning face told of his worry.
‘He isn’t safe, Robert. I must speak to him as a matter of urgency.’
Tessa rang the club and explained that Peter had set off for training that morning, and she wanted to know immediately if he should happen to turn up there.
‘You think he’s already in trouble, boss?’ Claire said quietly.
‘I do, Claire. We’ll head back to the station and see if anyone has come up with anything new.’
They were two minutes away from the station when Marsden’s phone rang out. She listened intently for a few seconds, then told Claire to pull over.
She continued to listen and then said, ‘Which hospital?’
A further minute passed and then she thanked whoever she had spoken to, before disconnecting.
‘Okay, Claire, Northern General as quick as you can. Peter Swift has turned up, he’s been taken there by air ambulance. It seems a hiker found him at the bottom of a steep drop, trapped in his car. He couldn’t get out, his leg’s broken but he’s alive. He was conscious when they airlifted him away, so let’s try to get there quickly, before they put him under for any operations he might need.’
‘You’re all heart, boss,’ Claire said with a grin. ‘Hold tight.’
Peter was a little drowsy; he had needed some industrial-strength painkillers.
‘I’d been there hours,’ he explained. ‘I thought I would die there. My phone was in my bag on the back seat and I couldn’t reach it. I kept sounding the horn, and in the end I think that’s what brought that feller to me. His dog kept licking my face.’
‘You lost control?’
‘You tend to lose control when you’ve got a laser beam blinding you. I had no vision, DI Marsden. The car carried on in a straight line, and I was on a bend. I went over the top. I don’t remember coming to a halt, so I think it must have knocked me out, the fall, but I came around eventually and that’s when I started hitting the horn.’
‘I’ve notified your club, and your partner, so they should be with you very shortly. However, you will be under guard while you’re in here. Somebody is trying to kill you, Peter, and I need to know who it is. I think you know. He’s already killed Oliver Merchant, Anthony Jackson and Isla Yardley.’
‘Oliver? But Oliver died in a…’ His voice faded away.
‘You’ve realised it’s a copy of your accident, have you? Losing control for no reason. I’ll bet my job on it being a laser beam that caused him to overturn that car. He didn’t survive, Peter.’
‘Did you say Isla?’
‘I did. She took a bullet, just like Mr Jackson. One of you has to start talking, I know you’re all hiding something.’
Peter pressed the bell and a nurse arrived at his bedside within what seemed like a split second. ‘I’m in too much pain for this, nurse,’ he said. ‘I need to be on my own.’
In no time at all, Tessa and Claire found themselves outside his room. They spoke to the PC who had been allocated the first shift of guard duty, and headed back to the car.
‘He’s not going to tell you an
ything, is he?’ Claire said.
‘Then we’ll find it out ourselves,’ Tessa responded.
25
‘This is a lovely house,’ Kat said, as the three of them stood peering through the wrought iron gates sealing the property off from the rest of the world. ‘I know we can’t get in, but I don’t think that matters. We’ve seen where the late Anthony lived, and it kind of sets him in my mind now.’
‘You sure you don’t want to have a look around?’ Mouse asked. ‘I can go back home and find out how to neutralise the gates and turn off the house alarm.’
Kat grinned. ‘No, you’re okay, thanks, Mouse. I can live without getting inside. I don’t think it will tell us anything new anyway, the police will have gone through it carefully and taken anything away that could possibly help. No, it’s enough to fix this in my mind. We seem to have turned into private detectives, haven’t we?’ Kat added with a laugh.
‘Yes,’ Mouse and Doris chorused.
‘Private detectives working from a bedroom.’ Doris smiled. ‘I think we’re wasting our time here. Kat’s right, this house can tell us nothing, other than Anthony Jackson was a very rich man, and to be honest, do we need to know anything else about him?’
All three turned away from the gates and headed back to Kat’s car.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ Mouse said. The other two groaned. ‘No, listen to me. Whoever that taxi driver was, he knew this area pretty well. He calculated exactly how to make us end up on the floor as he took the bends in the village – and they were right-angled bends for maximum effect – so he either lives here or he knows somebody very well who lives here. I need you to think carefully at this point, Kat.’
‘Can I think carefully when I get home? I’m driving.’
In a fluid movement, Mouse reached forward and hit the volume button on the radio. ‘Shhh,’ she said. ‘They just mentioned Peter Swift.’
Kat indicated and pulled to the side of the road. They listened without speaking, only turning to share looks of horror as the item ended.
‘That’s another one of the group. Anthony, Oliver, Isla and Peter.’
‘Peter survived, thank the Lord,’ Kat said.
‘Only by…’
‘The grace of God?’ Kat said, smiling at Mouse.
‘No, I was going to say the skin of his teeth if he went over any one of Derbyshire’s bloody stone walls. Bet his car’s a mess as well as him.’
They drove the rest of the way in silence, although Mouse’s thoughts were on Australia. As were Kat’s. As were Doris’s.
They sat around the table, each of them staring into the mug of tea in front of them.
‘Keith Lancaster,’ Mouse said. ‘The one in all of this who is out of the loop. We need to know why he headed off down under when he had such a good job with Anthony. But more than that, we need to know if he’s been back recently. Or is here now.’
Mouse’s phone pealed out and she looked at the screen with a frown. ‘Overend? Who do I know called Overend?’ She was about to reject the call when her face cleared. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Mr Overend, good to hear from you.’
There was a pause while she listened to the caller, then she said a series of yeses, before thanking him and disconnecting.
‘Insurance,’ she said with a smile. ‘The builders are moving into the house on Monday, and it should take about four weeks.’
‘Brilliant,’ Doris said. ‘Will you put it on the market straight away?’
‘I will. So now that’s in progress, we can maybe look around for another one for me.’
‘Don’t rush into anything,’ Kat warned. ‘You’re safe here, you and Nan.’
Mouse nodded. ‘I won’t. I’m looking for something a bit more substantial, rather than a home I can share with other students, so I’ll take my time, I promise.’
They continued to sip at their tea, until once again Mouse broke the silence. ‘I’m going to ring him, this Keith Lancaster. If he answers, I’ll make something up about investigating the murders; I just need him fixed in Australia at the moment, to rule him out of being the actual murderer. If he’s not there, then I’ll start digging to track if he’s over here.’
‘You can do that?’
‘As long as I tread carefully. Very carefully. You can find everything out really. Want the codes to launch a nuclear missile?’
Kat smiled, hoping Mouse wasn’t serious.
It seemed that Keith Lancaster didn’t want to answer his phone; Mouse waited until she knew it would be daytime in Sydney, but there was no response. She tried three times but there was nothing. The landline and the mobile number seemed to be mocking her, telling her Lancaster’s life was nothing to do with her.
She had no way of knowing if he was simply on vacation in Australia, so she decided to take the route of checking passenger lists for incoming flights. Again there was nothing. He hadn’t entered the UK, not under his own name. She hoped he wasn’t dead already.
Mouse walked down to the summerhouse carrying the file Doris had prepared with everything she had been able to find out about Craig Adams, and her laptop.
He was only twenty-two when he died. What on earth had he done so early on in his life to upset somebody so much they had shot him, she mused, her tongue sticking out between her teeth as she dropped deeply into her thoughts.
He lived in Bakewell with his mother Sally, father not on the scene. There was an address, but it was the house he had lived at in 2002, so it was doubtful that Sally Adams would still be there.
Mouse opened her laptop, and a minute later was checking the electoral role. Sally Adams was still at the same address. Mouse would talk to Kat, persuade her to drive them there, but felt it would be better to leave Nan at home; she would be safe with Leon.
She pulled the photograph of his headstone towards her and studied it. It told her nothing really, but she just felt a sense of… something as she looked at it. Okay, so he had probably become involved with the wrong people, but did he have to die? And something would have died in Sally Adams with her son’s death. He hadn’t had any siblings at the time of his murder, and Mouse doubted any would have followed.
With the file put tidily back in place – Doris’s words of keep it in the right order rang out clearly in Mouse’s mind – she sat back in the chair and closed her eyes for a moment.
Kat appeared in the doorway carrying two cups of coffee.
‘Where’s Nan?’
‘I’ve just taken her a coffee. She’s up in her bedroom. She looked a bit tired, but she’s on her computer so I didn’t ask what she was doing. I probably wouldn’t have understood,’ she added with a grin.
‘Then shall we nip to Bakewell? I was going to suggest going Saturday and leaving Leon to keep an eye on Nan, but if she’s working in her room we could go now.’
‘What for?’
‘To see a lady called Sally Adams, Craig Adams’s mother. I’m positive that whatever binds these eight people together, it’s connected with Craig Adams’s death, and maybe if we can talk to his mother she’ll be able to help, especially if we push the idea of her finally finding out who killed him.’
‘Finish your coffee and we’ll tell Nan, then go. He died fifteen years ago, it’s a bit of a stretch to think his mother will still be there.’
‘According to the electoral roll, she’s still there,’ Mouse confirmed. ‘I checked just a minute ago.’
Kat looked at her under lowered lids. ‘I should know better by now than to query it, shouldn’t I?’
Bakewell was busy, as always. Its beauty, especially by the river, drew many visitors every day, and Mouse decided Kat was blessed to only live six miles away from such an awesome place.
‘I love it here, it’s got everything,’ Mouse said. ‘Loads of shops that aren’t phone shops, craft shops, the riverside, the ducks, amazing place.’
‘Then maybe this is where you need to be looking for a house to buy. It’s a cracking place, and the Monday market is superb. Busy li
ttle town every day though, not just market day. Have you given any thought to what you want to do?’
‘Not yet, something will happen that will tell me what to do next.’ Mouse nodded, as if agreeing with herself.
Kat pulled up outside a small, stone-built terraced house; the bright yellow curtains both upstairs and downstairs gave it an air of being a much-loved house. She glanced at Mouse. ‘This is the address. What do we say?’
‘I think we tell the truth. We’re investigating Craig Adams’s death, and we’re looking for his mother. We’ll see what she says after that. We can’t let on we know she still lives here.’
They got out of the car, and Kat checked her clerical collar was on straight. She led the way up the path and knocked on the door.
There was no answer, and so Mouse knocked again.
They saw movement of a yellow curtain, and waited patiently. Eventually the door was opened and a woman of around sixty spoke through the gap afforded by the chain being on.
‘Yes?’
Kat hesitated. ‘I’m sorry to trouble you, but we’re looking for a lady who lived here at one time, a Mrs Sally Adams.’
‘Why?’
‘We’re investigating the death of her son, Craig Adams.’ Kat held her breath.
The door closed and they heard the sound of the chain being removed. This time the door opened fully.
‘Are you police? You’re wearing a dog collar.’
Kat smiled. ‘No we’re not police. My name is Katerina, Kat for short, and I’m the deacon at Eyam church. This is my friend Beth.’ Kat removed her ID badge from around her neck and showed it to the lady.
She examined it briefly, then handed it back. ‘I’m Sally Adams,’ she said. ‘You’d better come in.’
‘Can I offer you a drink?’ Sally had led them through to the kitchen, and indicated that they were to sit at the table. The oven was on, and it seemed she was baking. ‘I’m sorry to bring you in here but I’m baking for a cake sale, and these are nearly ready to come out.’